Monks Mound

Monk’s Mound – Cahokia World Heritage Site

Although we know little about the people that built the earthwork
mounds still visible throughout the Mississippi River drainage
system, we do know that the first mounds were built about 1500
B.C. and this first mound building epoch, the Late Archaic Period,
lasted until about 700 B.C. The mounds of Illinois were constructed
during the third epoch between 700 and 1250 A.D. during the era
known as the Mississippian Period. Cahokia became the center of a
thriving culture. The people used the waterways of the region to
establish a vast trading network among other towns and villages.
Their extensive resources included plants, animals, minerals,
shells, and stones. At its height of development, it is believed
that the population of Cahokia was about 20,000. Monk’s Mound
is a platform mound and it probably had some sort of structure
on its top level.

Cahokia began to decline after the beginning of the thirteenth
century. With no evidence of warfare or natural disaster to
account for the decline, a number of theories have been advanced.
Archaeologists found misshapen human bones from the period and
they are considered to be evidence of tuberculosis. Others suggest
a depletion of the soil that led to the deforestation of the area.
Still others believe that nearby sub-regions began to thrive just
as Cahokia was beginning its decline thereby replacing Cahokia as
the center of this large cultural site. Long after Cahokia’s demise,
the people of the region relied on the cultivation of corn and other
domesticated plants. While the ceremonial centers had grown to almost
continental in size, they remained functional but on a much smaller
scale. When Europeans arrived in the area, most refused to believe
that the ancestors of the native population in the area built the
mounds preferring to believe that the large earthen structures and
the artifacts they contained were the work of a superior culture of
white men who arrived sometime before Columbus. It is early in the
twentieth century before scientists are finally convinced that the
structures were created by the ancestors of the native people who
populated the area in the sixteenth century. The area became known
as Cahokia after the decline of the mound building era because
the band of Illinois Indians living in this area in the later
period were known as the Cahokia.